In our work for our Plugin Vulnerabilities service we frequently need to contact developers of WordPress plugins to let them know about security vulnerabilities in their plugins (either that we have discovered or that others have disclosed) and that often means submitting messages through contact forms (not surprisingly these are often handled by WordPress plugins). We have all too frequently run into situations where the contact forms didn’t work, which seems like a good reason for people managing websites with a low volume of contacts to periodically make sure that contact forms work, otherwise you could be missing out on messages.
In a recent instance of this, a loading graphic showed up after hitting Send and then that didn’t change to a message about the form being successfully sent. Pulling up the web browser’s console showed an error:
Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 401 (Unauthorized)
The page that related to was /wp-json/contact-form-7/v1/contact-forms/193/feedback, which would indicate the Contact Form 7 plugin was being used to handle the contact form. Visiting that page showed the following message:
{“code”:”rest_cannot_access”,”message”:”DRA: Only authenticated users can access the REST API.”,”data”:{“status”:401}}
Based on that it seems that disabling of WordPress’ REST API for those not logged in to WordPress caused the contact form to not work. A quick search showed that message was generated by another plugin, Disable REST API, which as the name suggest disables WordPress’ REST API.
As this shows, using something like that that disables the REST API can have some serious downsides. Not surprisingly for us, while looking into this we found someone in the WordPress security industry that doesn’t seem to have a clue about WordPress security pushing disabling it (and promoting using their plugin to do it), which we will discuss in a follow up post.
спасибо, помогло